Building ctags on OSX should be no different than building on GNU/Linux. The same toolchains are used, and the Mac OS
packaging scripts use autotools and make (as you’d expect).

You may need to install the xcode command line tools. You can install the entire xcode distribution from the App Store,
or for a lighter install, you can simply run xcode-select--install to only install the compilers and such. See
http://stackoverflow.com/a/9329325 for more information. Once your build toolchain is installed, proceed to the next
section.

At this point, if you’d like to build from an IDE, you’ll have to figure it out. Building ctags is a pretty straightforward
process that matches many other projects and most decent IDEs should be able to handle it.

Eventually, we hope to move the Universal-ctags formula to the main Homebrew repository, but since we don’t have any
tagged releases at this point, it’s a head-only formula and wouldn’t be accepted. When we have a tagged release, we’ll
submit a PR to Homebrew.

There other things where building ctags on OSX differs from building on GNU/Linux.

Filenames on HFS+ (the Mac OS filesystem) are case-preserving, but not case-sensitive in 99% of configurations. If a
user manually formats their disk with a case sensitive version of HFS+, then the filesystem will behave like normal
GNU/Linux systems. Depending on users doing this is not a good thing.